Fun Side Effects of Being an Insanity Graduate
You have a lower-than-average heart-rate and blood pressure, so sometimes you find yourself saying things like:
'My heart rate is 80 right now, I'm tachycardic!' (dear non-medic readers: tachycardic just means a heart rate that's too fast).
'If I'm ever found unconscious, I'm afraid they'll decide that I'm in shock or something, and then they'll load me up with pressors and kill me'. (Hi again my non-medic friend - so you should know that 'shock' isn't an extreme version of 'le gasp' - in this context, it's when your heart isn't pumping enough blood to your body; 'pressors' are drugs that help bring your BP up)
Change all the guidelines you want, WHO
Exercises like High Knees and Butt Kickers are 'friendly'. You've done them in every warmup and now even if they show up at the end of a super-intense workout, you feel nothing. These just can't burn you out anymore.
On the flip side, just hearing the words 'ski abs' or 'power jumps' makes you shudder. Gosh, those were evil.
And somewhere in between that spectrum above lies the fact that now you know a lot of fun and 'different' moves to work different parts of your body. Lower Back Strengtheners, anyone?
On the other hand, you also know hundreds of ab exercises that you can't do. And thousands of push-up varieties that you file under the #someday #goals categories on optimistic days. (Other days it's all about 'I've got a partially dislocated shoulder, this is never happening and thank God for that!')
This has in turn made you a professional at making up modifications for some exercises. Wide push-up jacks into narrow tricep push-up jacks? Umm no thanks. But you got this.
When other workouts you do have warmups that include marching in place and touching your toes, you think it's 'cute'. Such warmups are also disorienting though, because your definition of being 'warm' means having your heart in your throat, so you're never fully convinced that these warmups are enough.
Ditto with entire cardio workouts that don't make you sweat out buckets. There's always this nagging feeling like you haven't done enough…
But this is also why you're very comfortable with being a sweaty mess
Along that note, having cardio workouts that are 20s on / 10s off don't feel like they're that bad. I mean, after you've had to get through 180s on / 30s off..
Similarly, you've kind of only known 6 days work / 1 day rest workouts, so it's hard to digest when someone tells you that you can cut down and still be OK.
You know just how much to hydrate before a workout, and how to get through it with minimal intake. Because if you overdo it in the middle of the workout, you’ll have a tummy full of water. That’s no fun.
You're faster than you look. Of course, still not as fast as Shaun and his people, but your agility still ranks somewhere in the 'respectable' zone.
You have little patience for treadmill/cross trainer cardio - you're used to doing a range of different movements and jumping about the place.
This has nothing to do with the text. It was just funny
You don't know how to 'go at your own pace'. Even when Shaun wasn't calling out, you'd watch the cast dart about at super-human pace and that automatically made you try to go as fast as was humanely possible.
And that's all I've got for- no, wait. Before I declare that that's the end of this random list I came up with (mainly inspired by when #1 happened, and I thought to myself, this could be something fun to compile), I feel like a disclaimer is in order: I don't think doing everything Insanity-related is the answer to all of one's fitness goals:
It isn't sustainable. Unless working out is your full-time job, or something, it's not possible to keep doing mad levels of cardio for 5-6 days a week for 5-10 years.
With all the jumps, your knees can also take a battering if you're not careful.
You need strength training too - and I don't feel like all the bodyweight moves that are thrown into Shaun's workouts suffice. At least not for me, because of the speed at which things are moving and how I need to modify things - so I feel like it's important to have dedicated strength-training sessions (dumbbell or bodyweight resistance based) where you move slower and just focus on the muscle-building (rather than heartrate-raising) exercises.
Okay, now we're done.
Thanks for reading!
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